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Author name: Tara

Tara is a passionate Taiwanese-Canadian language learner and aspiring polyglot. She speaks French, Mandarin, and Spanish to varying degrees of fluency, and has a basic foundation of Japanese. She is particularly fascinated with researching the most effective language-learning techniques and applying them to her own studies.

Arabic Online Mini-Review: Learn Basic Phrases

Arabic Online

Rating 2.7
★★
★
★★★
Price:

Price: Freemium, Courses cost between £59 – £250

Summary

Arabic Online is a web-based course with native speaker audio, speaking practice, and recall activities. Although they provide a Guide To Writing Arabic e-book, you may want to check out Arabic Quick! for a more comprehensive introduction. This will help you at the intermediate level when most of the text uses the Arabic script. The section on Advanced Arabic and the Grammar Explorer seem promising: they have interactive activities and texts to improve your grammar, sentence building, and reading comprehension. The rest of the courses, however, focus on memorizing phrases for talking about food, shopping, travel, and formal and informal meetings by listening to and replicating dialogues. There isn’t as much focus on building sentences as there is about memorizing them. If you’re going to pay for a course, Arabic Online doesn’t seem as thorough or straightforward as other options. Additionally, the site has some bugs that can make navigation frustrating. Total beginners should probably look elsewhere to start their learning journey.

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Madinah Arabic Mini-Review: Text-Based Arabic Lessons

Madinah Arabic

Rating 2.8
★★
★
★★★
Price:

Free

Summary

Madinah Arabic is most suitable for learners focused on classical Arabic. It has text-based lessons for beginners and quizzes for intermediate learners. Although the interface is not very modern, it gives a decent introduction to the Arabic script, in addition to basic sentence structures with native speaker pronunciation for every word. After learning the basic script, there are over 100 step-by-step beginner lessons that start with practical sentence structures. Instead of learning basic phrases, such as how to order food at a restaurant, you will learn how to build your own sentences. There are a few fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice questions in the lessons, plus about 90 beginner to advanced quizzes to test listening and reading comprehension. The site also offers Arabic tutors over Skype with a free trial lesson. Keep in mind that the information may not be as easy to digest as in Duolingo or Arabicpod101, and it will probably take a lot of  discipline to make your way through the lessons.

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My Language Exchange Mini-Review: Millions of Active Users

My Language Exchange

Rating 4.2
★★★★
★
★
Price:

Freemium, Gold Memberships start at $6/mo

Summary

My Language Exchange has been growing since 2000. Although the website seems out of date, it still has an active community of millions of language-learners who speak almost 200 native languages (including less commonly studied languages). You can choose a pen pal by reading their bios, or there is a chat room available for you to instantly connect with a language exchange partner — note that if you create a Gold account, you can initiate chats with other users, but as a regular user, you will have to wait to be contacted. Using the Cormier Method, the website provides tools to help intermediate speakers effectively practice with other learners. It advertises a Chat Companion with lesson plans to accompany your exchange, or lesson plans developed by teachers (although the quality of these resources varies drastically).  You can also find language teachers on the site, but given that the transactions take place directly between you and the teacher, you may feel safer using a 3rd party platform like italki or Verbling.  Although there are outlines on how to participate in language exchanges, how these outlines are followed depends entirely on you and your partner(s). My Language Exchange will help you build connections with other learners, but it’s up to you to plan how to practice. The concepts can also be used with any language exchange platform, such as Lingbe, italki, Tandem, and Amikumu.

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Speak English Now Mini-Review: Interactive Audio Activities

Speak English Now

Rating 4.0
★★★★★
Price:

Freemium, with paid courses starting at $47

Summary

Speak English Now was created in collaboration with Oscar from Unlimited Spanish and therefore has a very similar style. The main difference is that Georgiana is not a native English speaker and doesn’t have a completely neutral accent. There are also a few (but rare) grammatical errors in her podcasts. On her website, you can find hundreds of downloadable podcasts with free transcripts. The podcasts provide an introduction to the teaching method in her four purchasable courses, and seem most appropriate for upper-beginner learners. Georgina avoids the traditional textbook methods of learning English and helps her students to learn to think in the language. Her episodes include short stories with accompanying exercises for you to respond to while you listen. Another type of listening exercise she provides is the point of view lessons, which tell a story twice — the second time, she changes the point of view or the verb tense to familiarize you with verb conjugations. The purchasable courses include a 30-day crash course and two courses that can help bridge the gap between the intermediate and advanced levels. There is also a Business English course that will prepare you for job interviews. If you want to improve your confidence in speaking English, these courses are probably a good investment, even if you are not learning from a native speaker. You could also just listen to the podcasts if you don’t need as much structure.

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Shirabe Jisho Mini-Review: Great for Apple Users

Shirabe Jisho

Rating 4.5
★★★★
★
★
Price:

Free

Summary

Shirabe Jisho is a Japanese Dictionary app for Apple users. You can search over 170,000 dictionary entries in both Japanese and English using handwriting, radicals, and romaji. Each entry is comprehensive, with stroke order diagrams for several thousand Kanji and example sentences from the Tatoeba project. It also provides positive, negative, and masu conjugations when relevant. You can customize your own word list or choose from the pre-made lists that include common words, expressions, slang terms, colloquialisms, JLPT levels, and parts of speech. Unfortunately, the app uses text-to-speech pronunciation, but you can use Forvo on your desktop browser to listen to native speaker pronunciations for free. The lists of similar kanji under each kanji entry are especially helpful to identify potential mix-ups. Although Shirabe Jisho’s breakdown of kanji components is not as comprehensive as in Kanji Study for Android, it still provides a helpful list of the basic components. If you have both an Android and an Apple product, Kanji Study for Android is still your best bet. However, for Apple users, Shirabe Jisho is a 100% free and ad-free dictionary option that is well worth your time.

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Maayot Mini-Review: Best For Those Who Struggle To Stay Motivated

Maayot

Rating 3.7
★★★
★
★★
Price:

Freemium, with paid plans starting at $10/mo

Summary

Although you can get unlimited reading practice through Du Chinese and The Chairman’s Bao for a lower cost, some people may be overwhelmed by having to remember to do their daily Chinese practice. Maayot helps to motivate you by delivering daily bite-sized reading activities to your inbox. The free activities include 5-minute stories for beginner to advanced learners (although the advanced lessons don’t seem to contain very complicated grammar structures), while the standard subscription adds audio recordings by native speakers and a daily quiz. With a premium subscription, you will get corrections to your daily writing responses and private tutoring once per week. To customize a similarly enriching experience, you can get free written corrections from the LangCorrect community, and find a community tutor on Italki. You can expect beginner stories to contain about 70 characters, while advanced stories contain about 250 characters. Clicking on characters you don’t know will send you to the MBDG dictionary website, so you may want to download the Zhongwen Chrome Extension extension instead. The Gymglish Series (Frantastique, Frantastique Ortho, Hotel Borbollón and Wunderbla) also takes the daily e-mail approach, so if you are studying French, German, English or Spanish, you can check them out (although the series is quite pricey).

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Hacking Chinese Course Mini-Review: Great Advice for a High Price

Hacking Chinese Course

Rating 3.8
★★★
★
★★
Price:

Freemium, with paid courses starting at $97

Summary

Hacking Chinese’s creator, Olle, is completing his graduate studies in teaching Chinese as a second language in Taiwan. His blog posts are just a taste of the two courses he developed to support you in your Chinese studies. These courses are more about how to learn Chinese and less about language content — they help maximize your studying efficiency, but they do not replace study time. The beginner course, Unlocking Chinese, teaches you the basic principles of writing and speaking and can guide you in your studies. It includes about 5 hours of videos divided into five sections that cover: how to approach learning Chinese; how to improve your pronunciation; techniques for learning new words; how to write and remember Chinese characters; and a ‘roadmap’ for your continuing studies. A Practical Guide to Learning Mandarin is both a book and an e-course. The course includes the book, the audiobook, videos, and a study checklist. Olle has condensed the information he has learned in his years of Chinese study to teach you how to improve your pronunciation, which resources to use, study management and planning, and more. Hacking Chinese may be a good investment if you want a clear and concise guide to learning Chinese. However, if you are looking for a course that will teach you comprehensive language content, check out Chinese For Us.

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French Classes Mini-Review: Has Lots of Long Grammar Explanations

French Classes

Rating 2.7
★★
★
★★★
Price:

29.5€/year

Summary

French Classes is a website that contains French lessons with accompanying exercises, transcriptions with audio, and 120 dictation exercises. The thirty-six beginner lessons will take you through the basics and lead you to full immersion at the intermediate and advanced levels. There are also about 200 supplementary audio lessons about travel, news, society, and culture with accompanying transcripts and contextual notes to support your learning. Each lesson is divided into two parts. The first part contains a grammar lesson, while the second contains a series of exercises. Both sections have an accompanying audio file recorded by native speakers. Unfortunately, the website does not detect your mistakes automatically, so you will have to check your responses yourself for the dictation and grammar exercises. This also means that you have to grade yourself on your progress. Overall, French classes may not be worth the investment unless you truly enjoy reading and listening to long grammar explanations. Also, you probably won’t be able to advance through the lessons without the support of other resources, like a private tutor. As an alternative, learners of all levels can check out TV5 Monde, while beginners may want to try French in Action or Podcast Français Facile . These are all free resources that have dynamic lesson structures.

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Casual Nihongo Mini-Review: Topics Mostly Focus on Dating

Casual Nihongo

Rating 3.5
★★★
★
★★
Price:

Free

Summary

Nあ～ Casual Nihongo is a podcast and website that teaches you how Japanese is used in casual contexts. Most of the episodes feature short, spontaneous conversations between two people, recorded in a public setting. On the Casual Nihongo website, you can find full transcripts of these dialogues with notes on how to use new phrases in context. After March 2020, there are fewer transcriptions of the full dialogues, but you can still find notes on key questions and phrases. The sound quality varies in each of the episodes — sometimes the voices are difficult to make out because of the background noise. Depending on your goal, this could be good training for listening comprehension, or it could be a little frustrating. Although Dai, the creator, touches on a few different topics, such as gambling and job-hunting in Japan, most of the episodes focus on dating, which might not appeal to all audiences. However, if you want to learn some slang and familiarize yourself with casual conversations, Causal Nihongo could be an enjoyable, free option. Alternatively, you can also check out Japanese With Noriko or Small Talk in Japanese, which are both podcasts that cover a wide range of topics.

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Domino Chinese Mini-Review: The Answer to Your Struggles

Domino Chinese

Rating 4.0
★★★★★
Price:

Freemium, monthly plans starting at $3/mo

Summary

Domino Chinese provides an affordable and entertaining path to learning Chinese. If you’re someone who has struggled to stay motivated, or if you have been overwhelmed with Chinese characters, Felix, the creator, has developed a manageable series of lessons to set you up for success. From lesson one, you will learn the logic of character composition and problem-solve the meanings of new words. Each level is about 10 hours long, and after level 10, the courses are entirely in Chinese. For supplementary material, they have printable character grids with stroke order diagrams, a workbook, and vocabulary sheets. The workbook gets you to break down characters into different parts, create new words, and practice integrating the new concepts from each lesson. Apparently you will reach an academic level of Chinese if you go through all of the levels. However, this seems far too optimistic. The success stories on the site are from students who have had private tutors or lived in China during their studies, so Domino Chinese alone will probably not take you to fluency. This course seems most appropriate for casual learners, as the earlier videos use lots of English and build the concepts quite slowly. If you’re looking for a comprehensive, faster-paced course, check out Chinese For Us.

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